[DarmokJalad1701]

> The yeast doesn't care about your schedule.

> The dough will rise when it rises, indifferent to your optimization.

Joke's on them! I run my oven until the temperature inside is ~100F - about a minute or so. Then I turn it off and set the dough in there along with some water (for humidity). It rises super fast compared to my kitchen which is ~65F in the winter and the bread is just as flavorful. Definitely not indifferent to my optimization.

[fn-mote]

> the bread is just as flavorful

“Thin bread.”

No sourdough enthusiast or artisanal bread baker would agree. You even get a different metabolic pathway active at higher temps.

Try the “low and slow” method, rise then let it sit a day in the fridge, see if it’s really the same taste.

[esperent]

I run a sourdough bakery with my partner, as it happens. Although I'm not a baker, coming from a mathematics background I'm the one most focused on process and quality control. We don't use any commercial yeast so I've picked a few things related to targeting different flavors using the same starter.

We use different temperature profiles during proofing for different products (we have fancy proofing fridges where we set temperature profiles over a 12 to 36 hour period depending on the product). Low and slow is good for certain types of bread, or pizza base. But not so much for a brioche or croissant dough.

I personally love slow fermented, heavy rye based sourdough, but lots of our customers don't and the bread we sell most is a classic white sourdough fermented comparatively quickly at higher temperature for a lighter and less sour taste. It's still very slow fermentation compared to commercial yeast, of course.

The proofing temperature profile for this bread isn't as simple as "start warm and gradually cool down" (i.e. the warm oven method), but that is a reasonable approximation for a home baker.

[lucyjojo]

sorry to ask but this is a rare occasion...

i started trying to make sourdough bread 2 weeks ago (and baking/cooking at all).

is there 1 definitive book/youtube channel/other kind of resource you would recommend to put mut on a solid path for a few months/years?

i just want to make sourdough bread daily in order to have healthy stable carbs at home. (stone milled complete grain flour and wild yeast). with the price of rice currently in japan it doesnt even look to be significantly more expensive.

[esperent]

I'm sorry to say I don't have any answers for you, at least nothing better than you'd get from searching on to r/sourdough or r/baking.

Like I said, I'm not a baker. My partner is. My focus is on other parts of the business, I was just sharing what I have picked up (via osmosis mostly) about different temperature profiles for different products.

[lucyjojo]

aaah... thanks for the answer though!

[DarmokJalad1701]

Maybe it depends on the yeast? I use commercial yeast and not a sourdough culture. The one I have ("Red Star Yeast") rises just fine with the method and the result tastes great!

[globular-toast]

My mother used to put the dough in a warm place. When I tried making bread I did the same. The bread was always disappointing, having a taste and texture more like "baked dough" than something I'd consider worth eating.

I discovered later that the length of time it spends rising matters. Room temperature (15-19 degrees Celsius) is optimal and will take a couple of hours for the first rise and less than an hour for the second. It is of course necessary to keep the dough away from any drafts. I keep it wrapped in a blanket or towel.

35 degrees Celsius is far too warm and won't give it enough time to develop the flavour and texture of good bread.

[ssl-3]

I don't bake, but I once installed an off-the-shelf PID controller into my kitchen oven[1] and this gave me some insights on things that are normally kind of inconvenient to observe (what, with the bright always-on LED display glaring at me at all times while I was in the kitchen with a constant report of what temperature in there was).

Like: The oven light. It's an incandescent bulb, which is also to say that it's waaaay better at being a heater than it is at being a source of light.

I found that leaving the light switched on in the oven, and the oven door closed, kept the temperature right around 100F. It varied a bit depending on ambient, but never by more than a few degrees.

---

[1]: It was an old Frigidaire-built electric range that someone gave me for free. It worked, until one day when I switched it on at a sensible temperature setting and put a frozen pizza in there. The temperature control then failed, and it failed stuck in the on position. The pizza was very badly burned and looked pretty crispy when I came back to it a short time later.

And when I tried to retrieve the pizza, the hotpad in my hand was converted directly from fabric into smoke as soon as it touched the pan.

While I lamented about the lost pizza and the expense of buying new replacement parts for an old freebie oven, a friend suggested using a PID controller and an SSR instead.

So I did exactly that: I bought the parts (including ceramic wire nuts and fiberglass-insulated wire), cut a square hole in the panel with a grinder and a deathwheel for the new controls, mounted an SSR in a recess on the back with an enormous heatsink, and it all went together splendidly. I put the new bits in series with the old bits, so it was never any less-safe than it had become on its own accord.

I miss that oven sometimes. It was actually kind of fun learning how to tune the PID, and to be able to reliably get a consistent temperature from it.

The oven-light discovery was just an accident; if I actually wanted 100F for some reason, I'd have just set the PID box to that temperature.

[tekne]

People tend to assume optimization means thin. Probably because you are usually optimised, by others, into thin-ness. To be optimized is passive.

But I think optimising yourself, or the world, hopefully in a positive way, is one of the thickest things you can do.

[jmathai]

I found this trick for store bought pizza dough as well. Instead of leaving out for 20 minutes, a warm oven helps it start rising a bit and results in a much better final product!

[IceCoffe]

Im just learning this is a thing, tell me more, how long do you leave it in there? Any ratio's you use?

[godelski]

Baking is weird. You first should start by following instructions to the letter. Then once you get it you'll be able to break all the rules.

The bread rises because of the yeast bacteria eats sugar and expels carbon dioxide. So ask yourself, what does yeast like? Probably not hard to guess that it's a warm, moist environment with plenty of sugar. Too cold and they're slow moving. Too hot and they burn up. But the goldilocks zone is that of most bacteria, a hot summer day in the tropics.

How long to rise? That's more a question of how fluffy you want the bread and how fast the bacteria eats the sugar.

Follow instructions while you're learning but think about things like this while practicing and you'll get your answers pretty quickly. The problem is no one can actually give you a direct answer because there's variance. Besides, the more important skill is to learn to generalize and get the intuition for it. So pay attention to how sticky the dough is, how fluffy, how it stretches, and all the other little things. Think about it during and after. If you do this I promise you'll get your answer very quickly

[kjkjadksj]

Yeast is fungus not bacteria. In lab setting it tends to be incubated at 30c, a little cooler compared to most bacteria at 37c.

[DarmokJalad1701]

Depends on the method/recipe. Most of the recipes I follow have at least two rising steps, following by another one after the dough is shaped into its final loaf (or whatever shape you want). Each one would be about an hour and half or so. It could be done with a single rise as well, but two rises tends to give more flavor. If you don't want it right away, a slow overnight rise in the fridge is also pretty good.

"No-knead" recipes usually involve 20-30 minute cadence of "fold-and-stretch" followed by a rise to allow the gluten to develop naturally without kneading. Usually about four times.

[dmoy]

How long to leave in depends on the dough, but you can get a quick rise in like less than an hour in the right temperature. Definitely don't leave it too long. I routinely forget and then it rises too much and eventually collapses when you go to bake it.

I use like 65% or maybe 70% hydration for bread, little more for whole wheat. Like 25:1 sugar (or less?), 100:1 salt, 100:1 yeast. High protein flour if you can.

For just basic bread, no sourdough, not a sandwich loaf, etc.

[lukevp]

Yep, some ovens (like mine) even have a Proof setting that keeps it at 100 degrees F automatically, for as long as you want. We make a lot of bread is how I know this